Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral

Last night's Glee Club concert in Sanders Theater was an unfortunate demonstration of the futility of good singing when pitted against incompetent management of a program. The evening could have been the outstanding musical achievement at Harvard this year if the excellent work of the Glee Club, Radcliffe Choral Society, and soloists had been supported by intelligent programming and handling of the orchestra. That G. Wallace Woodworth '24 did not offer this support was a major disappointment.

Mr. Woodworth made his first mistake when he selected his program. Handel's oratorio "L'Allegro" was the chief attraction. Instead of presenting all or most of the work, Woodworth elected to cut it down to less than half its original length and to devote the rest of the program to compositions by Randall Thompson '20. Granting Randall Thompson the right to performances by the Glee Club of his alma mater, one still wonders why such performances might not have been saved for some other occasion and "L'Allegro" given in a manner which did not make its music overshortened and its intense Miltonian text compressed out of meaning.

The next liberty taken by Mr. Woodworth was that of cutting the rich instrumental score of the original down to a meager violin, oboe, 'cello, horn, and piano continue. Although it would doubtless have been difficult to use a full-size orchestra on the Sanders stage, surely more could have been done with the situation than this feeble quintet, which was forced to play against more than 170 voices. As it was, the instrumentalists present were far from perfect in tone or even pitch, and their weakness undermined the total effect.

The ovatorio is a small work of Handel, but exceptionally lovely, especially in its word-coloration effects. That it did come through to the audience was a tribute to the finesse vocally and in diction of the combined choruses, the solid if unexciting virtues of bass soloist Paul Tibbetts, and the brilliant singing of Soprano Adele Addison.

Miss Addison was distinctly the star of the evening. She sang her part well technically; but more than that she sang with perfect feeling for the sincere, restrained emotion characteristic of the Handel-Milton combination. Instead of the colorless clarity used for Handel by British sopranos like Isobel Baillie she brought a superb temperate richness to her part.

Both Thompson works on the second half of the program gave the Glee Club and Choral Society, excellent opportunity to display the skill, precision, and wonderfully clear diction which have placed them at the top of amateur choral groups in the country.

"The Peaceable Kingdom," which followed the very effective "Alleluia," presents interesting contrasts between the men's and women's voices. It has none of the precise word-coloring technique of the Handel work but creates an impressionistic mood ranging from a style resembling Renaissance Church music to modern syncopation. Its close, a complicated fugue which is resolved into a unison crescendo, was somewhat disappointing. The earlier black and white differentiation between the righteous and the wicked was lost in the final phrase, "the mountain of the Lord.